Scientists link magnetic reversal, climate change and super volcano to same time period

In a press release today, the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences described the connection between the Laschamp magnetic reversal, thePhlegrean Field (Campi Flegrei) volcanic eruption that devastated most of southeastern Europe, and periods of frequent rapid cooling and warming.

The largest volcanic eruption in the Northern hemisphere in the past 100,000 years, the Campi Flegrei eruption pumped out some 84 cubic miles (350 cu km) of rock and lava and distributed ash over the entire eastern Mediterranean and up to central Russia.

Some researchers think these eruptions drove the Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for anatomically modern humans – Homo sapiens – to thrive in Europe and Asia.

Today, the Campi Flegrei is an eight-mile-wide volcanic caldera on the outskirts of Naples, Italy, a city of nearly a million people.

As with the Yellowstone super volcano, the Campi Flegrei is a popular tourist attraction. Filled with lakes of boiling mud, sulphrous steam holes and small volcanic features, its name comes from the Greek word for ‘burning.’ The ancients believed the area to be the gateway to hell.

The Campi Flegrei’s last major eruption took place about 12,000 years ago.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Gothenburg magnetic reversal also
occurred about 12,000 years ago.

“What is remarkable is the speed of the reversal,” the press release says.

“The field geometry of reversed polarity, with field lines pointing into the opposite direction when compared to today’s configuration, lasted for only about 440 years, and it was associated with a field strength that was only one quarter of today’s field.”

“The actual polarity changes lasted only 250 years. In terms of geological time scales, that is very fast.”

I’ve been telling you for years that magnetic reversals occur very quickly, and can be so short-lived that they are difficult to detect in the geologic record. Here’s confirmation.

During this period, the field was even weaker, with only 5% of today’s field strength. As a consequence, Earth nearly completely lost its protection shield against hard cosmic rays, leading to a significantly increased radiation exposure.”

Do you think “significantly increased radiation exposure”
might cause a few evolutionary leaps?

With our magnetic field strength having decreased by about 2/3rds in the last two thousand years, and with the rate of that decrease speeding up, I fear that we’re headed for another magnetic reversal right now.

41,000 years ago, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occurred. Magnetic studies of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on sediment cores from the Black Sea show that during this period, during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed to the south instead of north.

Moreover, data obtained by the research team formed around GFZ researchers Dr. Norbert Nowaczyk and Prof. Helge Arz, together with additional data from other studies in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and Hawaii, prove that this polarity reversal was a global event. Their results are published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

What is remarkable is the speed of the reversal: “The field geometry of reversed polarity, with field lines pointing into the opposite direction when compared to today’s configuration, lasted for only about 440 years, and it was associated with a field strength that was only one quarter of today’s field,” explains Norbert Nowaczyk.

“The actual polarity changes lasted only 250 years. In terms of geological time scales, that is very fast.” During this period, the field was even weaker, with only 5% of today’s field strength. As a consequence, Earth nearly completely lost its protection shield against hard cosmic rays, leading to a significantlyincreased radiation exposure.

This is documented by peaks of radioactive beryllium (10Be) in ice cores from this time, recovered from the Greenland ice sheet. 10Be as well as radioactive carbon (14C) is caused by the collision of high-energy protons from space with atoms of the atmosphere.

The Laschamp event

The polarity reversal now found with the magnetisation of Black Sea sediments has already been known for 45 years. It was first discovered after the analysis of the magnetisation of several lava flows near the village Laschamp near Clermont-Ferrand in the Massif Central, which differed significantly from today’s direction of the geomagnetic field. Since then, this geomagnetic feature is known as the ‘Laschamp event’. However, the data of the Massif Central represent only some point readings of the geomagnetic field during the last ice age, whereas the new data from the Black Sea give a complete image of geomagnetic field variability at a high temporal resolution.

Abrupt climate changes and a super volcano

Besides giving evidence for a geomagnetic field reversal 41,000 years ago, the geoscientists from Potsdam discovered numerous abrupt climate changes during the last ice age in the analysed cores from the Black Sea, as it was already known from the Greenland ice cores. This ultimately allowed a high precision synchronisation of the two data records from the Black Sea and Greenland.

The largest volcanic eruption on the Northern hemisphere in the past 100,000 years, namely the eruption of the super volcano 39,400 years ago in the area of today’s Phlegraean Fields near Naples, Italy, is also documented within the studied sediments from the Black Sea.

The ashes of this eruption, during which about 350 cubic kilometers of rock and lava were ejected, were distributed over the entire eastern Mediterranean and up to central Russia.

These three extreme scenarios, a short and fast reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, short-term climate variability of the last ice age and the volcanic eruption in Italy, have been investigated for the first time in a single geological archive and placed in precise chronological order.

Comments

Scientists link magnetic reversal, climate change and super volcano to same time period — 4 Comments

I thought I saw somewhere the location of the north pole is moving sufficiently rapidly to cause navigation by magnetic compass and maps to become unreliable with the need to correct navigational charts for those that don’t use GPS.

Is this evidence of the likelihood of a reversal ?

And you all thought it was the fault of CO2 induced ice melt – silly !

We have no complete record of the history of any reversal, so any claims we can make are mostly on the basis of mathematical models of the field behaviour and partly on limited evidence from rocks that retain an imprint of the ancient magnetic field present when they were formed. For example, the mathematical simulations seem to suggest that a full reversal may take about one to several thousand years to complete. This is fast by geological standards but slow on a human time scale.